I had originally intended to play this when it first came out in 2011 but then I decided to wait for the game of the year version because a lot of DLC came out for it and I ended up purchasing it in a Steam sale and as was the style at the time, it was pushed back in favour of other games. But now finally comes it's turn.
This game had very mixed reviews when it came out some saying it was awesome and some saying it gave them a weird uncanny valley feeling because the faces were very real but the rest of the bodies were usual stiff game characters. Then there was the reported controversy over the working conditions for Team Bondi during the development of the game and then their eventual lay-offs casting doubt over whether or not they will ever get to make any more games.
Despite all this, they did manage to make one very interesting and different game that is unlike anything I've played for quite a while. The basic premise of the story is that you play as Cole Phelps. A recent recruit into the L.A.P.D. who starts to make a name for himself by being a great detective and being able to crack cases that no one else can. You start off as a beat cop but soon get promoted to a traffic detective and work through a number of different desks including arson, vice and homicide. Each case you work involves searching crime scenes for clues, questioning people and trying to tell if they're lying to your or not. You can do this by just bluffing them or catching them out in a lie with evidence that proves them wrong. This is where the detailed faces come into play as you are meant to be able to tell when a person is lying to you just by their facial expressions. I found this a little hit and miss however but it might just be that I'm bad at reading people like this. There are also a number of action sequences in some cases that can involve chasing down criminals and either tackling, shooting or threatening to shoot them, vehicle chases where you must disable the suspects vehicle and shoot outs where you move around cover and shoot dudes. These action sequences don't seem too important to the plot and this is emphasised in the fact that you can skip them if you fail a few times. Although this rarely happened to me as I quite enjoyed the action parts as a good change of pace. Progression through cases can be different depending on how you do in questioning people, I.e. some things may not be revealed if you do not succeed with some questions so some people or areas of investigation may never be unveiled. At the end of each case, you are given a rating depending on how thoroughly you investigated everything, how you did in questioning and how many clues you found, but apart from achievements, these ratings do not seem to do much.
While it was fun working through the cases at first, coming into the middle of the game, a lot of them seemed to get very very samey and it felt like it was starting to drag. With the exceptions of the end missions in each desk which were usually different and almost like a 'boss level' in some ways. Fortunately, towards the end, the cases did start to have a bit more variety to them so that by the time things wrapped up, it had a good sense of momentum going. It's just a shame that the middle dragged so much as I feel that could have easily put a lot of people off or made them get bored and stop. I also learned that there were 2 other additional desks planned to be putting in making the game even longer, and it was already quite long taking me nearly 22 hours to get through. Rockstar axed these 2 additional desks saying the game was "long enough already" and I'd have to agree with them there.
I found this to be a very different and unique game. It did have it's shortcomings in the aforementioned dragging in the middle of the game, but all in all it's definitely something everyone should try because for now, it's as close as we're likely to get to a game being crossed with a film (maybe with an exception or 2) in a properly believable way. It also does a great job of capturing the era of the 40s in every way from the cars to the people, to the language and even attitudes of people involved. Plus it feels super-cool to be a detective in the 40s.
Bravo, Team Bondi. I hope you can pull yourselves together and make that follow-up.
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